Mobile Ad Spending Set to Soar

How high it will climb depends on how the market is sized.

New mobile ad spending projections seem to appear every day. One of the latest is from Strategy Analytics, which predicts that advertisers worldwide will spend $2.4 billion on mobile in 2009, up from $1 billion this year.

The research company expects a growing number of brands to insert ads into different mobile media.

eMarketer's own projections include the entire mobile ad economy: creative, related IT and other related spending.

Asked about the range of spending that mobile ads will drive, John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer, noted that "Some US universities have courses in mobile marketing right now. Mobile is at a point where online was 10 years ago."

eMarketer's projections are also generally higher than those of other
researchers, based on heavy adoption of mobile advertising in the rapidly growing BRIC economies—Brazil, Russia, India and China. Total worldwide spending on
mobile message advertising alone will reach $14.2 billion in 2012.

In the US, spending on mobile ads will reach $6.5 billion in 2012, up from $1.7 billion in 2008.